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Month: October 2015

This week I proceeded to use and adapt the techniques I used in the bookmaking workshop last week, I decided to use the concertina technique for my own artist book and to use a variation of the technique by covering it as if it was a regular book.

I felt that this style went well with the way I had my book set in a movie reel-esque layout.

I feel that completing this exercise has helped me with how I should go about creating books in the future, help and advice from Jay, someone who has created books professionally helped me to understand where I could possibly improve my book making with further pre planning rather than rushing into the creation process.

This was a project I enjoyed and am currently taking my experience from this to create an artist book of my own in further detail and will be completing alongside my university work.

I will be working on the physical book creation in order to improve that technique, which is the part of the process I feel I could have done a lot better provided with more time.

I also Reviewed and analysed fellow classmates books and Analysed their use of risk taking and how the book was percieved among the class.

Peer analysing other people’s work has helped me to do the same to mine, I am now looking at my own work as if it’s someone else’s in order to produce a more valuable opinion on my own progression, asking for constant feedback is another thing I intend to do in more of my projects.

The idea I have for my book is the rise and fall of Tony Montana from Scarface, I intend to digitally recreate some of the main important scenes from the film Scarface.

In my story book I wanted to highlight the fact that Tony starts off as a small time criminal and eventually builds his way up and ends up with a rich lavish lifestyle that anyone would be envious of. Then ends up throwing it all away, falls to the addiction to cocaine and reaches his inevitable demise. My aim was to find the scenes in the film that highlight the stages in his timeline, I started off with Tony’s first job, the botched up job that they narrowly ended up completing and barely escaped with their lives, this kicked off the crime spree so I thought it would be the right place to start.

I thought a scene of Tony and his best friend Manny living in style would be a good point to show their rising success at this point in the film.

I picked this one as it’s a very iconic point in the eventual fall of Tony’ Empire.

I picked this scene as it is one of the very end scenes and depicts Tony as the man with nothing to lose all alone fighting for his life.

I chose this because it’s the ending scene, and depicts Tony’s inevitable assassination and the end of his legacy.

Today we were introduced to After Modernism, where we would start off by analysing some images and such as the woman in Petrov’s “First woman uzbek tractor driver teaching a friend” from 1955 analysing it’s connotations and how for some reason the women look happy completing monotonous farm tasks.

We discussed some of Jackson Pollock’s works such as “autumn” and related this to Petrov’s painting.

Abstract expressionism was rising due to the desire to claim cultural leadership, official sponsorships, and the desire to synthesise the main trends of European Art.

We also learnt about the fragmented forms of cubism and it’s prominence in paintings in the 1940’s. Surrealism with it’s hidden imagery and Greenberg’s beliefs about modernism.

Today I participated in a book making workshop with Sarah, a professional illustrator and book maker, as someone who is very interested in books, whether it is graphical or entirely text based, I was very excited about the idea of learning how to create any form of book.
Learning how to create different styles of book, with varying sizes and amounts of pages was quite enlightening, it dispelled the idea I had that physically creating a book would be a lengthy and difficult process. It turned out to be a very simple process, yet provided a great resulting product.

I experimented with a few new processes that I had never encountered before, such as stitching paper and applying a material coating to a book.

I feel that I have learnt a valuable skill that will help me in the story project and in any further projects or briefs that I encounter at any point in my life.
This is a very valuable skill set and will drastically increase my versatility and creative options when thinking about future work.

We created some smaller paper folding books prior to creating the fully bound books as practice on a smaller scale and alternative to the hardback style.

This was my submission for the Image brief, a project were I really wanted to step out of my comfort zone and try to use as much of the collage aspect as possible, something that I haven’t used in the past and I wasn’t too sure if it was much of a success, I could have used the materials I collaged onto the piece differently by maybe scanning them in and using them as overlays, I feel like I’ve left a bit too much negative space around the outside when I could space the piece out a bit.

I could also implement a better source of hierarchy to this piece because it’s very centrally focused but without much reasoning when I look at it in hindsight.

I decided to also use human eyes from pictures I took myself of my flat mates to see how they might affect the composition when implemented alongside animal eyes.

I have already implemented some collaging techniques with the animal eyes and digitally added some of the imagery, now I intend to further expand on the collage aspect with images of the human eyes, using the wire and some pieces of link chain I managed to get hold of.